Copts protest against unfair sentence
Nader Shukry
Coptic activists, led by the Maspero Youth Union (MYU) are today
planning a demonstration in front of the High Court in central Cairo to
protest against what they see as an unjust, non-ju
stifiably
harsh sentence by the Minya Criminal Court. Simultaneously, said MYU
member Andrawus Eweida, other protests will be held in the towns of
Alexandria, Assiut, Minya, and Suez.
The court ruling in question
had sentenced 12 Copts to life imprisonment while it acquitted eight
Muslims who had been prosecuted for the same charges.
Eweida called
upon Muslim Egyptians to join the Copts in today’s protest to announce
their rejection of injustice, and to take a stand against what he
described as “court sentences based on religious identity”.
The
Criminal Court of Minya in Upper Egypt had yesterday sentenced 12 Copts
to life imprisonment for their part in a fight which took place in the
town of Abu-Qurqas in April 2011 and which left three Muslims dead, and
several Copts’ houses and cattle sheds looted and burnt.
Alaa’
Rushdy, Yacoub Fadl, Abdullah Mikhail Abdullah, Adel Abdullah Mikhail,
Fanous Nady Ibrahim, Magdy Nady Ibrahim, Gamal Fouad Hanna, Eid Ibrahim
Fanous, Safwat Kamel Habib Ghattas, Eid Abdullah Mikhail, Magdy Abdullah
Mikhail, and Saeed Waheed Deif were all sentenced. The court acquitted
the eight Muslim men who had been charged in the same case: Ahmed
Mustafa Rabie, Taher Atef Taher, Khaled Ibrahim Mohamed, Ahmed Badr
Ahmed, Ramadan Abdel-Azim Mohamed, Reda Sayed Ahemd, Ismail Mamdouh
Mahmoud, and Ikrami Abdullah Mohamed.
The April 2011 fight in
Abu-Qurqas village in Minya had erupted over a speed bump which the
Coptic lawyer, Alaa’ Rushdy, had constructed in front of his house in
order to slow down traffic. The defendants, the 12 Copts and eight
Muslims, had all been charged with mobbing, premeditated murder,
threatening public peace, sectarian sedition, arson, and using
unlicensed arms to threaten security and public order.
The MYU
had last evening issued a statement in which it said that the several
recent court rulings which indicted innocent Copts and exonerated Muslim
offenders has made it impossible to commit to the policy of refraining
from comment on court rulings. The only two crimes in which Muslims were
sentenced for murder of Copts were the cases of Nag Hammadi where seven
were shot as they left church following Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve
(6 January) in 2010, and that of Dairout in which a Muslim policeman man
shot at six Copts on a train, killing one of them and wounding the
others. In some 160 cases of attacks against Copts during the past
decades, no-one was indicted.
“No sound reason,” the statement
said, “can condone the notion that defending oneself, one’s family,
honour, and property, is a crime which warrants life imprisonment.”
For its part, the Alliance of Egypt’s Copts announced it will contest the ruling.
Watani International
22 May 2012
